Newsletter, February 2019
Volume 3, Issue 1
Kent State University will host its Environmental Science and Design Symposium on March 20 and 21 at the Kent Student Center. The annual conference — previously known as the Water and Land Symposium — will mark its sixth year in 2019, while its new title demonstrates the first major event led by the University’s newly-formed research initiative of the same name.
The Environmental Science and Design Research Initiative, formed in 2018, unites Kent State faculty from several colleges and disciplines, whose research focuses on natural and built environments and interactions between the two. These include researchers in ecology, biology, hydrology, geology, and geography, as well as those in architecture and environmental design, and fashion merchandising.
The 2019 theme, “Complexity of Environmental Legacies,” highlights many of Kent State’s research strengths and the areas of special focus that brought these researchers from such diverse backgrounds together to collaborate on novel research projects from conception to publication.
“Too often, we tend to compartmentalize and view environmental issues through a narrow lens,” said Dr. Joseph D. Ortiz, Professor of Geology at Kent State. “But as populations grow and pristine environments and resources diminish, we need to be more integrative to see how past conditions influence current problems.”
The symposium welcomes as its keynote speakers: Dr. Elizabeth Boyer, Associate Professor of Water Resources at Penn State University, Director of the Pennsylvania Water Resources Research Center, and Assistant Director for Institutes of Energy & the Environment; and environmentalist and photographer J Henry Fair.
Other guest speakers include: Dr. Chris Winslow, Director of the Ohio Sea Grant Program at Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory; Jennifer Grieser, Senior Natural Resources Area Manager for Urban Watersheds at Cleveland Metroparks; and Dr. Bess Krietemeyer, Assistant Professor in Architecture and founder of the Interactive Design and Visualization Lab (IDVL) at Syracuse University.
Kent State speakers include: Dr. Elizabeth Herndon, Assistant Professor of Geology; Dr. Rui Liu, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Environmental Design; and Dr. Noel Palomo-Lovinski, Associate Professor of fashion Design and Merchandising.
“The selection of speakers offers a unique opportunity to think about the different tools, techniques, visualizations and interests that enable thoughtful, environmentally responsive design,” said Diane Davis-Sikora, RA, Associate Professor in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, and ESDRI Co-Director.
The symposium will feature a book signing with J Henry Fair and an exhibit of his photography, a student poster session, a panel discussion led by Dr. Ortiz, and opportunities for outside advertisers and employers to promote their services, network, and recruit students for internships and permanent positions.
The itinerary, online registration forms for attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors, and additional information about the symposium can be found at https://www.kent.edu/ESDRI-symposium. The deadline for attendees and student abstract registration is February 1, exhibitors, recruiters, and sponsors must register by March 10.
Media Contact:
Dan Pompili, dpompili@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Return to February 2019 Newsletter
Gerontologist Recruiting Custodial Grand-Families for Study
AMLCI Partners with Podiatry College to Design New Device
Anthropology Grad Student Breaks the Mold with a Novel Experiment (VIDEO)
NSF GOALI Grant Funds Sensor Research Partnership with Merck
Foot ulcers are one of the most prevalent and dangerous problems facing diabetic patients, but new technology developed at Kent State University may soon help doctors better understand and treat them.
The device, called a “dynamic plantar shear sensor,” represents a breakthrough for physicians to understand how plantar ulcers form.
It has long been believed that plantar ulcers in diabetic patients form at areas of highest plantar pressures,” said Dr. Vincent Hetherington, Professor of Podiatric Medicine. “However, the correlation of plantar pressure and ulcer formation is unclear. Many researchers have long believed there was a missing link.”
Recent studies suggest that the missing link could involve shear forces that may play a significant role in ulcer development.
Unlike direct forces, created when the foot comes straight down, shear force pushes one part of the tissue in one direction and another part in the opposite direction.
The device was developed and built by KSU alumnus Dr. Misha Pevnyi and Tianyi Guo, a graduate student in KSU’s Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program in the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute (AMLCI). The project, funded by a grant from the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine, was overseen by Dr. Peter Palffy-Muhoray and Dr. Hiroshi Yokoyama — both in the AMLCI — in addition to Dr. Hetherington.
“Shear forces are hard to measure,” Dr. Palffy-Muhoray said. “It’s relatively easy to measure the pressure under foot, and devices already exist to do that, but the question was how to effectively measure shear?”
The answer, Pevnyi and Guo found, was to transduce shear stresses to more easily measurable local pressures.
Little bigger than a large computer keyboard, a platform was made mostly of specially shaped pressure plates, 3D printed in Dr. Palffy-Muhoray’s lab, with a pivot plate on top and electrodes and microprocessor-based electronics for data-collection beneath. Data are automatically uploaded to a web server for instant access and monitoring via smart phone.
Guo worked on the 3D printing and layout while Pevnyi did the electrical and software development. AMLCI engineer Merrill Groom contributed to the IC chip design and assembly.
“The new device can measure both plantar pressure and shear forces simultaneously,” Dr. Hetherington said. “To the best of our knowledge, at present there is no comparable device commercially available.”
He said the next steps include improvements of the prototype and clinical testing, followed by use of the technology as a medical analysis tool. Future goals include developing a device for in-shoe application.
The KSU Patent Board has recently approved the device for federal patent application, and funding to continue development is currently being sought.
Palffy-Muhoray said the project is also unique because of its altruistic nature.
“The device is the first of its kind, and there’s this really nice aspect of two young people putting tremendous effort into it, not for money or even the prospect of money, but essentially just to help sick people,” he said. “Misha, who is now developing software for a financial company, drove here on weekends from Chicago,” Palffy-Muhoray said. “And Tianyi took time off from her thesis to work on the project.”
Media Contacts:
Dan Pompili, dpompili@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Emily Vincent, evincen2@kent.edu, 330-672-8595
Return to February 2019 Newsletter
Kent State to Host Environmental Science & Design Symposium
Gerontologist Recruiting Custodial Grand-Families for Study
Anthropology Grad Student Breaks the Mold with a Novel Experiment (VIDEO)
NSF GOALI Grant Funds Sensor Research Partnership with Merck
Custodial grandparents and their grandchildren are a unique and little-understood population, as are the physical and social health challenges they face. A Kent State University researcher has designed a program that could help to assess the well-being of families and provide resources to help them thrive.
Dr. Gregory Smith, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies in Kent State’s College of Education Health and Human Services, is now recruiting participants, nationally, for the second phase of his five-year $2.8 million project, “Social Intelligence training for custodial grandmothers and their adolescent grandchildren,” funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Aging.
The project stands on the shoulders of two previous federally-funded studies Dr. Smith has conducted since he began researching custodial grand-families in 1996.
Custodial grandparents care for a grandchild full-time without involvement from biological parents, irrespective of formal legal status like adoption or foster care.
“Most of the researchers who study these families are gerontologists like me,” he said. “In the very earliest research on these families, we applied theoretical models and conceptual frameworks that we used to study family caregivers to older adults. Through my first study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, I caught on to the fact that this is really a parenting phenomenon.”
Dr. Smith’s current project focuses on custodial grandmothers of children aged 12-18 in collaboration with Dr. Frank Infurna of Arizona State University.
“Adolescent grand children had been largely ignored, so we’re the first nationwide intervention study looking explicitly at them,” Dr. Smith said. “Our focus on delivering our online program to the grandmother and grandchild simultaneously makes great sense because we know female caregivers have the greatest impact on adolescents’ social competence development, and adolescence is the peak period for developing social competence.”
Dr. Smith said social competence is negatively affected when people experience early life adversities like being abused by a parent, having a parent incarcerated, or the death of a parent.
“That throws off a person’s ability to attain social competence, which in turn prevents them from forming meaningful and helpful relationships with other people.”
Dr. Smith said these grandchildren are highly likely to have experienced early life adversities, given the reasons most of them are in their grandmothers’ care. He said researchers also suspect that so too have the grandmothers, “because these patterns of suffering early life adversities are transmitted across generations,” he said. “In turn, the lifelong distress associated with having experienced adversity in early childhood can negatively affect one’s ability to parent future generations.”
Dr. Smith said social intelligence training is thought to be especially effective in people who have experience early life adversities.
“So there’s a great deal of scientific basis for this study. Never mind the fact that these are custodial grand-families, ours is the first study of any type to look at the effects of delivering a social intelligence intervention simultaneously to a female caregiver and an adolescent child,” he said.
Media Contacts:
Dan Pompili, dpompili@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Emily Vincent, evincen2@kent.edu, 330-672-8595
Return to February 2019 Newsletter
Kent State to Host Environmental Science & Design Symposium
AMLCI Partners with Podiatry College to Design New Device
Anthropology Grad Student Breaks the Mold with a Novel Experiment (VIDEO)
NSF GOALI Grant Funds Sensor Research Partnership with Merck
The Eren Lab at Kent State University’s Department of Anthropology is among the University’s busiest and most prolific. Unlike the very inanimate objects he studies, Dr. Metin Eren, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences, seems to be in a state of perpetual movement, and his students are no different.
One of Dr. Eren’s graduate students, Ashley Rutkoski, is just among the most recent to conduct a novel experiment to answer some of archaeology’s oldest questions.
“After stone, ceramic sherds are one of the most abundant things we find in the archaeological record,” Dr. Eren said.
Sherds are fragments of clay pots that ancient — and even more modern — civilizations used to collect, carry, and store food and other valuable resources.
“We’re going to see whether or not we can simply tell the difference between pots that are filled with corn when they break, versus empty ones,” Dr. Eren said. “If we can tell the difference between the shape of the sherds in those two conditions, we’ll expand this research and try other conditions.”
“It’s going beyond typology and trying to gain more information about human behavior, like how pots were discarded and end up in the archaeological record in the first place,” said Rutkoski. “Pots were used, but how they were ultimately discarded is just as important.”
To conduct the experiment, Rutkoski took the process all the way back to its roots, using raw clay that required months of processing before she could even begin crafting the 30 identical pots she used.
“It took her months to process the clay, and make the pots, and to create the temper and add the temper to the clay, and shape these just beautiful replicas,” Eren said. “She then broke every single one over the course of two days.”
Half the pots were filled with whole kernel corn, while the other half were empty.
“Really, there’s never been an experiment where they break the pots like this and they actually do the morphometrics of the sherds,” Dr. Eren said.
Rutkoski has already gained some insight from early results of her tests.
“With full vessels, in comparison to empty vessels, there’s more of breakage in the base of the vessel that radiates up to the rim,” she said.
“Not only is Ashley doing a research project that’s cutting edge archaeological science, it’s just cutting edge science in general,” Dr. Eren said.
Media Contacts:
Dan Pompili, dpompili@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Emily Vincent, evincen2@kent.edu, 330-672-8595
Return to February 2019 Newsletter
Kent State to Host Environmental Science & Design Symposium
AMLCI Partners with Podiatry College to Design New Device
Gerontologist Recruiting Custodial Grand-Families for Study
NSF GOALI Grant Funds Sensor Research Partnership with Merck
Many homes today include safety devices like smoke, radon, and carbon monoxide detectors to warn us of threats our senses might not pick up in time. For those whose jobs regularly place them harm’s way, though, advanced sensing technology is not as readily available.
Thanks to a rare GOALI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), however, Kent State University researchers in the new Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute (AMLCI) will be able to work with partners at Merck Performance Materials to advance life-saving sensory technology.
The three-year grant provides $330,000 for Torsten Hegmann — Professor, Ohio Research Scholar, and associate director of the AMLCI, and Elda Hegmann — Assistant Professor in the AMLCI and Department of Biological Sciences in the Kent State College of Arts and Sciences, to study liquid crystal-nanoparticle sensors for detection of toxic gases and vapors.
Recent findings have shown that nanoparticles induce and alter the orientation of nematic liquid crystal molecules in direct contact with them. This interaction is the basis for creating highly sensitive and selective sensors that produce direct visual readouts or warnings without the use of electrical power.
The integrative sensor systems, which the Drs. Hegmann have developed with Merck Materials, can display an unmistakable warning in the form of text or an image in the presence of toxic gases and vapors, and provide parts-per-million level sensitivity.
Hegmann said the project may help them to produce various sensors uniquely designed for highly toxic gases that could protect the lives and health of firefighters and other first responders, military personnel in conflict zones, and workers in chemical manufacturing, among others. Sensors for volatile gases and vapors exhaled by humans also could be used to monitor disease states and disease progression.
The project also is supported by a $100,000 grant from the TeCK Fund, a hybrid technology commercialization accelerator program jointly administered by Kent State and Cleveland State University, with funding provided by the Ohio Third Frontier Commission and the two universities.
“This is one of three KSU projects we funded over the past year through the TeCK Fund, and it’s exactly the kind of research and innovation the partnership was intended to support,” said Steve Roberts, Kent State’s Technology Commercialization Director. “We are very proud of the work the Hegmanns have done with Merck Materials, and of course we are very pleased that the NSF saw the same potential in this project.”
Media Contacts:
Dan Pompili, dpompili@kent.edu, 330-672-0731
Emily Vincent, evincen2@kent.edu, 330-672-8595
Return to February 2019 Newsletter
Kent State to Host Environmental Science & Design Symposium
AMLCI Partners with Podiatry College to Design New Device
Anthropology Grad Student Breaks the Mold with a Novel Experiment (VIDEO)